Haryana Quiz: Irrigation, Canals and the SYL Canal

Ambala lies in the north-eastern corner of Haryana, inside the command of the canals drawn from the Yamuna system, and its fields are watered mainly by that flow supply rather than by any other source; the Dadupur head on the Western Yamuna Canal was built to carry water into this…

The barrage was built on the Yamuna in Yamunanagar district a short distance upstream of the old Tajewala headworks and was commissioned in 1999.

The Delhi sultan Firoz Shah Tughlaq had a canal cut from the Yamuna in the fourteenth century to carry water westwards towards Hisar, where he founded Hisar Firoza, and that channel is the ancestor of today's Western Yamuna Canal.

Both canals are headed at the Okhla barrage on the Yamuna below Delhi.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi laid the foundation stone of the canal in 1982 at Kapoori in Patiala district, after the 1981 agreement between Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan on the sharing of the Ravi and Beas waters.

The agreement signed in 1981 between Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan reallocated the surplus Ravi and Beas waters, and Haryana's share was fixed at roughly 3.5 million acre feet, to be carried by the proposed Sutlej Yamuna Link canal.

A sprinkler breaks water into drops and spreads it like rain, so the field does not have to be levelled and no flowing sheet of water is needed.

In check or check basin irrigation the field is levelled and divided into small rectangular plots, each enclosed by low bunds or levees, and water is let into one plot at a time until the required depth stands in it.

These western districts lie outside the command of the Yamuna canals, so their supply comes from the Sutlej through the Bhakra Nangal works: the Bhakra Main Line and the Narwana branch carry it into Hisar, Fatehabad, Sirsa and parts of Jind and Bhiwani, and it is this water that turned…

The land in Bhiwani, Charkhi Dadri, Mahendragarh and Rewari rises above the level of the main canals, so water has to be pumped to it in stages.

The Central Soil Salinity Research Institute of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research is at Karnal.

Under the scheme the state pays an incentive per acre to farmers in blocks where groundwater has fallen deepest if they sow maize, pulses, cotton, bajra or other dry crops in place of paddy, and it links the help to registration of the crop on the state portal.